Nick @internic@qoto.org

🚨 A small Wes Cook / McDonald’s Art update! I've just added three new scans to my archives.

• Restaurant layout with carousel: https://wescook.art/2024/11/27/mcdonalds-la-tijera-mural/
• Technical Gobblin puppet breakdown: https://wescook.art/2024/11/27/mcdonalds-stage-5-re-do-part-1/
• This incredible masterpiece (those puppeteers!): https://wescook.art/2024/11/27/mcdonalds-stage-5-re-do-part-2/

Enjoy! (If you’re wondering what this is all about, visit https://wescook.art/)

A hundred starship captains, bored with life in the Federation, decide to form a line of ships and let them plunge straight into an enormous spherically symmetrical black hole - one right after the other.

The black hole is so large that the tidal forces don't destroy the starships as they cross the horizon. What does the 50th captain see, the moment their starship crosses the horizon?

(Suppose there's no accretion disk or other junk blocking the view.)

(1/n)

Periodic re-up of my "Building Inclusive Teams" talks.

This stuff is even more important over the next four years.

Part 1: Building Inclusive Engineering Teams
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SYsI-6_csMY

Part 2: Gatekeepers and Difficulty Anchors
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0G8IHGF9RZg

Part 3: The Future of Work is Equitable
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RRS-v2G7vo8

Part 4: Career Stories
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dabep1EYuUU

This is great.

https://www.skeletonclaw.com/

[random, interesting to me]
I grew up in East Tennessee, so I was aware of how the TVA disrupted some communities. But I had no idea there was a thriving freshwater pearl industry nearby, that dried up once the dams were in place.

https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2018/05/a-pearl-rush-grips-clinch-river.html

did some buffering tests in 10 languages where I wrote the equivalent of this program and then ran the program with `./program | grep hello`

```
while True:
print("hello")
sleep(1)
```

In 4 of the languages (Python, Ruby, C, Perl) nothing at at all gets printed (because they buffer the output)

in the others (Go, C++, JS, Rust, Java, Lua, bash) you see "hello" printed out once per second

code: https://github.com/jvns/buffer-stdout-tests

wrote up a reply to @cwebber's "How decentralized is Bluesky really" blog post:

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t

On my first day in office as Federation President I will impose a 25% tariff on the Gamma Quadrant until they halt the flow of Ketracel White into the Alpha Quadrant. Thank you for your attention to this matter. #startrek

Might be my best sleuthing scoop this year (ah still 30+ days to go!):

Hacker in Snowflake Extortions May Be a U.S. Soldier

Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake, but a third suspect — a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m — remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person’s identity may not remain a secret for long: A careful review of Kiberphant0m’s daily chats across multiple cybercrime personas suggests they are a U.S. Army soldier who is or was recently stationed in South Korea.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/11/hacker-in-snowflake-extortions-may-be-a-u-s-soldier/

@jacob @danilo And this is why Threads and Bluesky have so much momentum, especially when compared to Mastodon. They've been more welcoming to users of all backgrounds, more appealing to celebrities, including not (selectively) complicating or discriminating.

As much as I want the Fediverse to win, it's clear that ideals and politics are getting in the way of greater adoption, which will continue to render it irrelevant. No amount of apologism will make up for coming short on its potential.

When I talk about the importance of going all in on the Fediverse, I speak based on experience.

At Opera we built a massive user community. When I quit, we had something like 35 million registered users and 35 million monthly visitors.

The new Opera management did not see the value of that. They believed it was cheaper and better to just use Facebook and that investing in your own community was a waste of money. So they closed down MyOpera and built a following on Facebook and Twitter instead. Then they got caught by the bait and switch when Facebook changed and you would no longer reach your audience, without paying. Later on Twitter changed as well.

This is important to explain to companies and institutions as they go shopping for social media sites to invest in. The best investment is clearly in your own site, being part of the Fediverse. It is not even all that expensive to do. It may take longer to build, but at least it is your own.

Not saying you cannot build a following on those other sites, but your long term strategy should be the Fediverse with your own server.

We try to lead the way here and thus we build Vivaldi Social. Not just for our selves, but to make a point and support the Fediverse.

#fediverse #Mastodon #Twitter #Threads #BlueSky #Vivaldi

In 1926, Menger proved that you can embed any compact 1-dimensional space in his famous fractal sponge, including a loop, but he didn’t say anything about the knottedness of the embedded loop.

Now three teenagers and their mentor have proved that you can actually embed any *knot* in the Menger sponge: you can deform any knot without the string having to pass through itself so that it ends up as a subset of the Menger sponge.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/teen-mathematicians-tie-knots-through-a-mind-blowing-fractal-20241126/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03639

MastoCulture values the overall victory of mass adoption less than it does maintaining ideological purity and insularity. “I don’t care if Masto gets popular” is a posture that cedes all leverage to shape the future of social software.

Consider:

Mastodon became a one-way dumping ground for Threads posts

While Bluesky’s explosive growth is forcing Threads to change its product to remain competitive

If you can’t scare Zuckerberg, you’re not really in the game tbh

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/25/24305690/threads-default-following-feed-test

One of the advantages of not having an algorithm is the freedom to put a like on a random post you found funny/interesting on a topic you don't really care much about, without being immediately being bombarded with a deluge of very similar posts.

So I tried to be open-minded, as always, and had some goes at ChatGPT in the last few months.

To find something I wanted to buy. To write a Haskell program. To write an Agda proof. To have my VPN ignore ssh connections in MacOS. To write a recommendation letter. To improve my prose. And much more.

All I managed to achieve was to waste time.

There wasn't a single thing that made me think "Oh, yeah, this is great! I am adopting it."

But, who knows. Maybe there are some kinds of jobs that ChatGPT can do better than people. I am sorry for those people, if they exist.

in case you missed it, I’m doing a big zine sale on Friday!

you can put it in google calendar if you’d like a reminder: https://wzrd.page/cal (or ical: https://wzrd.page/cal.ics)